Amazon has long been synonymous with e-commerce, but for advertisers, it’s become something much bigger: an omnichannel media powerhouse.
Amazon’s DSP isn’t your normal ad platform; with audiences spread across streaming, connected devices, and live sports, and powered by logged-in data and closed-loop attribution, Amazon gives marketers a way to build smarter, more connected campaigns.
Here, we explore how Amazon’s ecosystem is reshaping modern media strategy, from its DSP and Prime Video to Fire TV, Alexa, attribution, and partnerships, and why it’s becoming essential for brands aiming to maximize efficiency and impact.
Amazon DSP in context
Amazon DSP sits at the intersection of scale and precision, giving advertisers access to both Amazon’s vast owned inventory, spanning Prime Video, Fire TV, Twitch, IMDb, Alexa, and Whole Foods, and an extended supply network that reaches millions of consumers instantly. Beyond its own ecosystem, Amazon has also expanded household addressability and scale through partnerships with Roku, Disney, and Netflix, ensuring advertisers can capture audiences across multiple premium streaming environments.
The platform is vital to brands because it offers guaranteed reach at scale, amplified by Amazon’s recent move to auto-enroll subscribers into its ad-supported Prime Video tier, ensuring advertisers can connect with one of the largest streaming audiences in the world. At the same time, its audience diversity spans shoppers, sports fans, gamers, cord-cutters, and connected-home households, creating opportunities to reach consumers across different mindsets and moments.
Most importantly, Amazon’s logged-in user base enables efficient targeting that minimizes waste and duplication, allowing brands to achieve more with their media dollars. In practice, Amazon DSP unites the mass-reach benefits traditionally associated with TV and the precision targeting capabilities of digital into a single, powerful solution for advertisers.
Why Prime Video matters to your media strategy
Amazon automatically opted all Prime subscribers into ad-supported video in Feb 2024 (unless they paid extra to avoid ads). The move created instant, massive reach for advertisers, giving Prime Video a distinct advantage over competitors like Netflix, which requires users to opt in for ads. For brands, this means guaranteed access to one of the largest and most diverse streaming audiences in the world, spanning households, demographics, and viewing behaviors that extend well beyond traditional linear television.
While Prime’s overall library may not yet rival Netflix in volume, its growing slate of originals and exclusive programming continues to expand. More importantly, Prime Video has locked down premium live sports properties like Thursday Night Football and, recently, NBA partnerships. Live sports deliver real-time, must-watch moments with highly engaged audiences, and because Amazon owns this inventory, advertisers can secure placements that drive both visibility and association with cultural tentpoles.
Combined with Amazon’s show-level reporting, which allows brands to see exactly where their ads ran, validate audience composition, and adjust creative strategies to specific programming, marketers gain a level of transparency and accountability that is rare among streaming platforms.
Fire TV and Alexa: Everyday entry points
Beyond Prime Video itself, Fire TV opens an additional layer of opportunity. The device serves as a gateway to streaming, giving advertisers high-impact placements like homepage takeovers that dominate the screen the moment a user turns on their TV.
Amazon is also expanding channel sponsorships, such as custom free ad-supported TV (fast channels) hubs around events like March Madness, which blend content, branding, and utility in ways that extend campaign impact. Even in households where viewers choose the ad-free Prime tier, Fire Stick and Fire TV devices ensure advertisers can still engage users through navigation experiences and cross-app visibility.
Alexa, on the other hand, turns passive ad exposure into active engagement. Through interactive ads, consumers can respond in real time with simple voice commands like, “Alexa, send me more info.” This creates a seamless path from awareness to measurable lead generation, something that traditional advertising formats rarely achieve. By enabling direct consumer action in the moment of interest, Alexa helps brands shorten the funnel and capture intent more effectively.
Together, Fire TV and Alexa extend campaigns beyond streaming content to become part of consumers’ daily habits. Whether through a screen takeover as someone settles in to watch TV, or a quick voice response while preparing dinner, these touchpoints embed brand messaging into routines in a way that feels natural, relevant, and connected. For advertisers, this means campaigns don’t just reach audiences, they live with them.
Closed-loop attribution: Amazon vs. others
One of Amazon’s biggest differentiators in the advertising space is its ability to offer true closed-loop attribution through Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). Unlike traditional tag-based reporting, AMC combines DSP campaign data with customer data platform (CDP) inputs, business outcomes, and Amazon’s vast ecommerce and shopper insights.
This integration allows advertisers to see not just who was exposed to an ad, but how that exposure translated into real actions, from product searches to purchases, across the Amazon ecosystem and beyond. For marketers, it unlocks a much richer understanding of the full customer journey, linking media investment directly to measurable results.
Compared to Meta or Google, which may connect ad exposure to some forms of engagement or conversions, AMC’s strength lies in its ability to tie together ad exposure, customer data, and transactional outcomes into a single ecosystem. This holistic view allows advertisers to validate performance with precision and optimize campaigns in ways that are difficult, if not impossible, on other platforms.
Strategic partnerships: Scaling reach
Amazon’s rapid expansion into strategic partnerships with companies like Roku, Disney, and now Netflix is extending Amazon’s scale well beyond its owned platforms, creating more opportunities for advertisers to reach diverse audiences while maintaining consistent frequency control across channels. For brands, this means they can tap into premium inventory that blends Amazon’s logged-in data advantages with the reach of other major publishers, ensuring campaigns deliver both breadth and precision.
Early adopters of these opportunities gain a first-mover advantage, accessing richer inventory, gathering deeper insights, and carving out a competitive edge before the market becomes saturated.
The timing of adoption is critical. As Amazon’s ecosystem matures and more advertisers enter the space, competition for the best placements will inevitably drive up costs. Brands that test and refine their strategies now will be better positioned to scale efficiently later, having already established benchmarks, optimized creative for the environment, and learned how to best leverage Amazon’s closed-loop attribution capabilities. In short, early investment in Amazon’s expanding partnerships isn’t just about reach; it’s about building smarter, more cost-effective strategies that will compound in value as the ecosystem continues to grow.
Amazon Ads and Netflix recently announced a partnership that will allow advertisers using Amazon DSP to directly purchase Netflix’s ad-supported inventory starting in Q4 2025. The new partnership gives advertisers access to a premium streaming environment while leveraging Amazon’s e-commerce data to drive stronger targeting and attribution. If done well, this integration could make Netflix ads easier, more efficient, and more connected to commerce outcomes than what many alternative paths offer.
Amazon is no longer optional in a modern media strategy. Brands that embrace its ecosystem today will not only capture incremental reach and performance but also build the competitive advantage that comes with being early, agile, and data-driven.